Nick Lachey seemingly shaded his first wife, Jessica Simpson when he said marriage is “always better the second time.” Lachey, 49, made the comment on the season three reunion of Netflix’s reality dating series Love is Blind Wednesday (November 9). The host told former contestant Matt Bolton, who met his second wife on the show, “[Marriage] is always better the second time, right?”
The Netflix show is co-hosted by Lachey and his wife of 12 years, Vanessa Lachey. After they fist-bumped, Bolton answered Lachey, “Cheers to that” while laughing.
Lachey and Simpson were married from 2002 until 2006 and had their own reality show Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica on MTV from 2003-2005. He married Total Request Live host Vanessa Joy in 2011. Simpson remarried in 2014 to former football player Eric Johnson. Lachey and Simpson each have three kids in their second marriage.
Simpson later wrote about her marriage with Lachey in her 2020 memoir Open Book, alluding to the difficulties of navigating a new marriage while making a reality series. “Nick loved the fact I was so strong in my faith and that I had this wide-eyed innocent approach to life,” she wrote, according to US Weekly. “When he proposed in 2002, I said yes. We were young and pioneering our way through reality television, always mic’ed and always on. We worked, and we were great at it, but when it came time to being alone, we weren’t great at it anymore.”
She called Lachey her “first love” and said she has no regrets about their marriage. “I was 22, and I had just pledged my life and destiny of this man. And I don’t regret it. Nick was meant to be my husband. No one else was supposed to have my virginity.” Likewise, Lachey said he was “happy” for Simpson in 2020 during an appearance on the Today show with Vanessa. “There’s definitely a mutual respect there, obviously it was a long time ago, and we’ve all moved on,” he said.